Great article by Sean Hollister on the demise of the QWERTY slider. In the article, Hollister speaks with Doug Kaufman, manager of handset strategy for Sprint, and his revelations are intriguing - it's not so much that people do not want hardware keyboards; it's that people want iconic, flagship phones - like the S4, like the 5S - with huge marketing pushes. Since nobody is pushing a flagship QWERTY slider... Nobody buys them. However, when you ask consumers what they want, physical keyboards are very, very popular.

And so, Kaufman admits: if there was an HTC One or Galaxy S4, a top-of-the-line phone, but with a keyboard - it would sell.

I'm one of those rare birds that who's not really grasping the appeal of crappy little displays or doing 'computing' style tasks on a phone -- or even a tablet... or even most laptops these days. I want a phone that makes calls -- if I'm going to use a computer, and therein *SHOCK* TYPE anything, I'll go sit down at a desktop.

I guess I'm just really odd... I want a to make a call I'll use a phone, but for anything I would actually do using a computer -- I 'need' a full size full travel keyboard, preferably with mechanical switches. I still don't get the appeal or even the purpose of anything in-between those two extremes. PARTICULARLY if you care about typing anything.

Well, apart from making people walk around like zombies paying more attention to their phones and tablets than they are doing things like driving or crossing the street.

It seems like all this crap is just the province of the L33t TLDR re-re's.